By Humeyra Pamuk

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The United States did not support recent Israeli strikes on Syria, the State Department said on Thursday, adding that Washington made clear its displeasure after tensions escalated and worked quickly to stop it.

On Wednesday, Israel launched airstrikes in Damascus, while also hitting government forces in the south, demanding they withdraw and saying Israel aimed to protect Syrian Druze - part of a small but influential minority that also has followers in Lebanon and Israel.

(Reuters) -A Russian crew member of a Greek cargo ship sunk by Houthi militants is undergoing treatment in Yemen, Russia's state RIA news agency said on Thursday, quoting a source.

RIA identified the Russian mariner as Aleksei Galaktionov, one of several crew members picked up by the Yemeni navy after the ship was sunk. It quoted a highly placed source as saying the man, who had suffered wounds in the attack, was now in a markedly improved condition.

BEIRUT (Reuters) -One elderly man had been shot in the head in his living room. Another in his bedroom. The body of a woman lay in the street. After days of bloodshed in Syria's Druze city of Sweida, survivors emerged on Thursday to collect and bury the scores of dead found across the city.

A ceasefire overnight brought an end to ferocious fighting between Druze militia and government forces sent to the city to quell clashes between Druze and Bedouin fighters.

"We mothers of soldiers haven't slept in two years," said Ayelet-Hashakhar Saidof, a lawyer who founded the Mothers on the Front movement in Israel.

A 48-year-old mother of three, including a soldier currently serving in the army, Saidof said her movement brings together some 70,000 mothers of active-duty troops, conscripts and reservists to demand, among other things, a halt to the fighting in Gaza.

By Olivia Le Poidevin

GENEVA (Reuters) -Israel has demanded the U.N. Human Rights Council scrap a commission investigating rights violations in the Palestinian territories and Israel, accusing the body of bias, in a letter seen by Reuters.

In the message sent on Wednesday, Israel's ambassador to the UN, Daniel Meron, said The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, discriminated against his country.

SARAJEVO (Reuters) -Slovenia declared two far-right Israeli cabinet ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, persona non grata on Thursday, the first European Union country to do so, Foreign Minister Tanja Fajon said.

The government accused Israel's national security minister Ben-Gvir and finance minister Smotrich - both West Bank settlers - of making "genocidal statements" and inciting violence against Palestinians.

LONDON (Reuters) -Details of more than 100 British nationals including spies and special forces soldiers were included in one of the country's worst ever data breaches that led to thousands of Afghans being relocated to the UK, British media reported on Thursday.

The leak by the Ministry of Defence in early 2022, which surfaced on Facebook a year later, prompted the relocation of more than 16,000 Afghans to Britain as of May this year amid concerns that they would face deadly reprisals from the Taliban.

Dozens of Druze crowded the Israeli-controlled side of the armistice line in the occupied Golan Heights on Thursday, hoping to catch a glimpse of relatives on the Syrian-held side who might try to cross the barbed-wire frontier.

Young men drove around the area near the de facto border, waving the Druze flag with its five colourful stripes representing the pillars of their Druze faith, an esoteric offshoot of Shiite Islam.

Slovenia announced on Thursday that it would ban two far-right Israeli ministers from entering in what authorities said was a first in the European Union.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich will be declared "persona non grata," the Slovenian government said in a statement, accusing them of inciting "extreme violence and serious violations of the human rights of Palestinians" with "their genocidal statements".

Residents emerged from their homes to scenes of devastation on Thursday after government forces withdrew from the Syrian Druze-majority city of Sweida, leaving behind looted shops, burned homes and bodies littering the streets after days of violence.

"What I saw of the city looked as if it had just emerged from a flood or a natural disaster," Hanadi Obeid, a 39-year-old doctor, told AFP.

What started as deadly clashes between local Druze fighters and Bedouin tribes on Sunday quickly escalated after government forces were deployed to the province the following day.